For exposing
a local school board's culpability in turning some county schools into failure
factories, with tragic consequences for the community. (Moved by the Board from
the Public Service category, where it was also entered.)

National Reporting

The Washington Post Staff

For its
revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate
how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely
to be.

International Reporting

Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times

For thoroughly
reported and movingly written accounts giving voice to Afghan women who were
forced to endure unspeakable cruelties.

Kathryn Schulz

Feature Writing

Kathryn Schulz of The New Yorker

For an
elegant scientific narrative of the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, a
masterwork of environmental reporting and writing.

Commentary

Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe

For
extensively reported columns that probe the legacy of busing in Boston and its
effect on education in the city with a clear eye on ongoing racial contradictions.

Criticism

Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker

For
television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness
of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.

For fierce,
indignant editorials that demanded truth and change after the deadly assault of
an inmate by corrections officers.

Jack Ohman

Editorial Cartooning

Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee

For cartoons
that convey wry, rueful perspectives through sophisticated style that combines
bold line work with subtle colors and textures.

Public Service

Associated Press

For an
investigation of severe labor abuses tied to the supply of seafood to American
supermarkets and restaurants, reporting that freed 2,000 slaves, brought
perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms.

Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev,
Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter of The New York Times

For
photographs that captured the resolve of refugees, the perils of their journeys
and the struggle of host countries to take them in.

Feature Photography

Jessica Rinaldi of The Boston Globe

For the raw
and revealing photographic story of a boy who strives to find his footing after
abuse by those he trusted.

Jessica
Rinaldi of The Boston Globe

Photography
Staff of The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC

LETTERS,
DRAMA & MUSIC

Fiction

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)

A layered
immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a "man of two
minds" -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.

Drama

Hamilton, by
Lin-Manuel Miranda

A landmark
American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose
story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.

History

Custer's Trials: A Life on the
Frontier of a New America, by T.J. Stiles (Alfred A. Knopf)

A rich and
surprising new telling of the journey of the iconic American soldier whose
death turns out not to have been the main point of his life.

Biography or Autobiography

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by
William Finnegan
(Penguin Press)

A finely
crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a
distinguished writing career.

Poetry

Ozone
Journal, by Peter Balakian (University of Chicago Press)

Poems that bear
witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger
and uncertainty.

General Nonfiction

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, by
Joby Warrick
(Doubleday)

A deeply
reported book of remarkable clarity showing how the flawed rationale for the
Iraq War led to the explosive growth of the Islamic State.

Music

In for a Penny, In for a Pound, by
Henry Threadgill (Pi
Recordings)

Recording
released on May 26, 2015 by Zooid, a highly original work in which notated
music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression
of modern American life (Pi Recordings).

History of The
Pulitzer Prizes

By Seymour
Topping with additional editing by Sig Gissler

In the latter years of the 19th
century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American
journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the
most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest
government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism
in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

His
innovative New York World and St. Louis Post-Dispatch reshaped newspaper
journalism. Pulitzer was the first to call for the training of journalists at
the university level in a school of journalism. And certainly, the lasting
influence of the Pulitzer Prizes on journalism, literature, music, and drama is
to be attributed to his visionary acumen.

In writing
his 1904 will, which made provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer
Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in
journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and four traveling
scholarships. In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel, an original
American play performed in New York, a book on the history of the United
States, an American biography, and a history of public service by the press.

But,
sensitive to the dynamic progression of his society, Pulitzer made provision
for broad changes in the system of awards. He established an overseer advisory
board and willed it "power in its discretion to suspend or to change any
subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the
judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be
conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by
reason of change of time." He also empowered the board to withhold any
award where entries fell below its standards of excellence. The assignment of
power to the board was such that it could also overrule the recommendations for
awards made by the juries subsequently set up in each of the categories.

Thus, the
Plan of Award, which has governed the prizes since their inception in 1917, has
been revised frequently. The Board, later renamed the Pulitzer Prize Board, has
increased the number of awards to 21 and introduced poetry, music, and
photography as subjects, while adhering to the spirit of the founder's will and
its intent.

Award changes beginning in 1997

The board
typically exercised its broad discretion in 1997, the 150th anniversary of
Pulitzer's birth, in two fundamental respects. It took a significant step in
recognition of the growing importance of work being done by newspapers in
online journalism. Beginning with the 1999 competition, the board sanctioned
the submission by newspapers of online presentations as supplements to print
exhibits in the Public Service category.

The board
left open the distinct possibility of further inclusions in the Pulitzer
process of online journalism as the electronic medium developed. Thus, with the
2006 competition, the Board allowed online content in all 14 of its journalism
categories. For 2009, the competition was expanded to include online-only news
organizations.

For 2011,
the Plan of Award was revised to encourage more explicitly the entry of online
and multimedia material, with the board seeking to honor the best work in
whatever form is the most effective. And for 2012, the board adopted an
all-digital entry and judging system, replacing the historic reliance on
submission of scrapbooks.

The other
major change was in music, a category that was added to the Plan of Award for
prizes in 1943. The prize always had gone to composers of classical music. The
definition and entry requirements of the music category beginning with the 1998
competition were broadened to attract a wider range of American music.

In an
indication of the trend toward bringing mainstream music into the Pulitzer
process, the 1997 prize went to Wynton Marsalis's "Blood on the
Fields," which has strong jazz elements, the first such award. In music,
the board also took tacit note of the criticism leveled at its predecessors for
failure to cite two of the country's foremost jazz composers. It bestowed a
Special Citation on George Gershwin marking the 1998 centennial celebration of
his birth and Duke Ellington on his 1999 centennial year.

In 2004, the
Board further broadened the definition of the prize and the makeup of its music
juries, resulting in a greater diversity of entries. In 2007, the music prize
went to Ornette Coleman for "Sound Grammar," the first live jazz
recording to win the award. The Board also awarded posthumous Special Citations
to jazz composers Thelonious Monk in 2006 and John Coltrane in 2007.

Award Controversies

Over the
years the Pulitzer board has at times been targeted by critics for awards made
or not made. Controversies also have arisen over decisions made by the board
counter to the advice of juries. Given the subjective nature of the award
process, this was inevitable. The board has not been captive to popular
inclinations. Many, if not most, of the honored books have not been on
bestseller lists, and many of the winning plays have been staged off-Broadway
or in regional theaters.

In
journalism the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, andThe Washington Post, have
harvested many of the awards, but the board also has often reached out to work
done by small, little-known papers. The Public Service award in 1995 went to
The Virgin Islands Daily News, St. Thomas, for its disclosure of the links
between the region's rampant crime rate and corruption in the local criminal
justice system.

In 2005, the
investigative reporting award went to Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper
in Portland, Oregon, for its exposure of a former governor's long concealed
sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl. In 2008, the feature photography
prize was captured by the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for its portrayal of a family
coping with a parent's terminal illness. In 2010, the Public Service prize went
to the Bristol, Va., Herald Courier, a small daily, for exposing the
mismanagement of natural gas royalties owed to thousands of landowners. And in
2013, the National Reporting prize was won by InsideClimate News, a small
online news organization.

In letters,
the board has grown less conservative over the years in matters of taste. In
1963 the drama jury nominated Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?," but the board found the script insufficiently
"uplifting," a complaint that related to arguments over sexual
permissiveness and rough dialogue.

In 1993 the
prize went to Tony Kushner's "Angels in America: Millennium
Approaches," a play that explores homosexuality in the early days of the
AIDS crisis, before transmission was widely understood or effective treatment
was available. Kushner doesn't shy from strong language, a change from earlier
playwrights whose cursing could have cost them an award.

On the same
debated issue of taste, the board in 1941 denied the fiction prize to Ernest
Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," but gave him the award in 1953
for "The Old Man and the Sea," a lesser work.

Notwithstanding
these contretemps, from its earliest days, the board has in general stood
firmly by a policy of secrecy in its deliberations and refusal to publicly
debate or defend its decisions. The challenges have not lessened the reputation
of the Pulitzer Prizes as the country's most prestigious awards and as the most
sought-after accolades in journalism, letters, and music. The Prizes are
perceived as a major incentive for high-quality journalism and have focused
worldwide attention on American achievements in letters and music.

Announcements

The formal
announcement of the prizes, made each April, states that the awards are made by
the president of Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer
Prize board. This formulation is derived from the Pulitzer will, which
established Columbia as the seat of the administration of the prizes.

Today, in
fact, the independent board makes all the decisions relative to the prizes. In
his will Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia of $2 million for the
establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be
"applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public
service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of
education."

In doing so,
he stated: "I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism,
having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and
one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the
people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of
character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to
acquire the highest moral and intellectual training." In his ascent to the
summit of American journalism, Pulitzer himself received little or no
assistance. He prided himself on being a self-made man, but it may have been
his struggles as a young journalist that imbued him with the desire to foster
professional training.